The UK government is soliciting feedback from a handful of internet providers, but isn't consulting the tech industry or the public.

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun a criminal investigation into Uber Technologies Inc's use of a software tool that helped its drivers evade local transportation regulators, two sources familiar with the situation said.

SiFive is the first fabless semiconductor company to build customized silicon based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture.

Tired of the domination of x86, ARM, and other closed chip architectures, researchers created the open-source RISC-V architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010.

Publicité ciblée en fonction des statuts et des messages, profils commercialisés, collecte de données... Facebook est connu pour son goût pour vos informations personnelles. Mais cette fois, le roi des réseaux sociaux est-il allé trop loin ?

On apprend en effet que près de 700.000 utilisateurs anglophones de Facebook ont été le sujet d'une expérience scientifique sans le savoir. Pendant une semaine, en janvier 2012, Facebook et des scientifiques des universités Cornell et de Californie à San Francisco ont voulu savoir si les émotions exprimées par les contacts de ces utilisateurs influençaient leur humeur. En somme, quelle est la "contagion émotionnelle" de Facebook.

Mais il ne s'agissait pas d'une simple observation empirique. Les scientifiques ont modifié les flux d'actualité de 689 003 personnes en bougeant le curseur du nombre de messages positifs et négatifs et observer les réactions sur "l'humeur" des cobayes... Concrètement, certains utilisateurs étaient exposés à plus de messages positifs, d'autres à des statuts plutôt négatifs et un dernier groupe à des messages neutres.

Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a holographic imaging process that depicts the radiation of a Wi-Fi transmitter to generate three-dimensional images of the surrounding environment. Industrial facility operators could use this to track objects as they move through the production hall.

There's two things that don't get mentioned much with this issue.

1. There's a second bug that allows non-root local users to provision AMT. "An unprivileged local attacker could provision manageability features"[1]

2. Access to AMT allows you to boot a recovery image, mount local drives, and do whatever you like with the included remote KVM.[2][3]

So, even if this is turned off, there are issues to address. If it's on, they have control of the whole machine, remotely. It's as bad as it can get.

Something similar has happened with Transmission's download DMGs being replaced on their servers [1] (twice! [2]) in recent memory.

The Technical Preview also phones home with data about the files you open and "performance or usage information," including what program features you use most often and how long the system takes to respond to clicks.

And then there's this gem, which is the one that got everyone moaning about keyloggers:

[When you] enter text, we may collect typed characters and use them for purposes such as improving autocomplete and spellcheck features.

Companies need to say “no” to privacy-invading innovations.

Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year.

Patch for severe authentication bypass bug won’t be available until next week.

I have actually spent the past five years peeking into people’s insides. I have been studying aggregate Google search data. Alone with a screen and anonymous, people tend to tell Google things they don’t reveal to social media; they even tell Google things they don’t tell to anybody else. Google offers digital truth serum. The words we type there are more honest than the pictures we present on Facebook or Instagram.

La loi pour une République numérique impose à toutes les collectivités de plus de 3 500 habitants, soit environ 4 000 entités, d’ouvrir leurs données. Le gouvernement a confié à l’association Open Data France la mise en place d’un dispositif d’accompagnement des petites collectivités, baptisé Open Data Locale, reposant sur 9 territoires pilotes (lire Maire info du 12 décembre 2016). Le 27 avril, un premier bilan du dispositif a été présenté à Créteil.

Summary The investigations on Thunderbird’s future home have concluded. The Mozilla Foundation has agreed to serve as the legal and fiscal home for the Thunderbird ...